I love a good horror game, and the recent Silent Hill 2 remake has got a lot of us at Mr Vinyl excited (we’re gamers too!). Very early on in the game (so this is really not a spoiler), main character, James, encounters a puzzle where you have get a vinyl record working again by sticking it back together with glue.
Whilst we’re loving all the references to vinyl and vinyl culture out there, we would just like to lovingly point out that this isn’t possible.
In fact, could this be the hidden message and gloomy secret behind Silent Hill? People missing, scattered pieces of vinyl records and broken jukeboxes really add to the misery of the place 😊 – which is exactly what we wanted from the game any way, shout out Konami.
As for the basic science of why you cannot glue a vinyl record back together, in case you were wondering:
A vinyl record is an analogue sound medium. The sound of a vinyl record is that of a (hopefully) diamond tipped stylus running along a single spiral groove that makes a sound as it hits the sides and bottom of the groove. In fact, even with amplifiers and speakers switched off you can faintly hear the record playing if you put your ear close to the record when it is playing. Gluing a record back together would assume that the record is perfectly put together, lining up grooves exactly, without any ridges or deviations (which is just about impossible). Even the slightest inaccuracy or glue residue would be very problematic, leading to pops, clicks, ramped grooves, skips and possibly even damage to your stylus, so rather don’t try it.
As far as glue goes, you might have seen or heard of people using wood glue to remove the grime and dirt in the grooves of a vinyl record. Whilst we’ve met a few people who swear by this being a solution, we have encountered 100s of failed attempts and damaged records by this over the years. You seriously risk ruining your vinyl record with this technique, and we don’t recommend it at all. Rather look into a professional vinyl cleaning service out there it’s faster, probably cheaper and definitely safer.
